Fighting Misogyny in Gaming Begins At Home

Paul Tassi
, ContributorNews and opinion about video games, technology and the internetOpinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

There are many, many facets to obstacles facing women in gaming. There's the fact that most big games are still blood and guts fantasies meant to appeal to young men There's the way female developers are treated within the industry, as if some can't believe they actually work there (see the whole #1reasonwhy movement we've discussed recently). But perhaps most pressingly, it's how female players are treated when they play the games themselves, or even express an interest in gaming in general.

The reality of being a girl gamer is downright astonishing at times. Something as innocuous as a feminine-sounding gamertag can draw in an inbox full of horrifying messages. Speaking over voicechat and revealing your gender is taken as an invitation for sexual harassment.

The best (well, worst) way to see this in action at the moment would likely be the blog "Fat, Ugly or Slutty." The name refers to the three most common paths of insults directed from men to women over gaming services, both console and PC. Female gamers take screenshots of the creeps that send them gender-based hate mail. It's fun to publicly shame the clowns, but it speaks to the fact that the community has a lot of growing up to do.

That's often a common excuse when this issue is brought up. Many of these harassers are not grown up. Many are young teenage males and therefore the excuse becomes, "well, they're just being boys, they'll grow out of it eventually."

But that's not it. No matter what age you are, there's no excuse for behaving in this fashion. As kids, we all usually grow up with some sort of playful "war of the genders." Boys are gross, girls have cooties, etc. As time goes on however, that changes once sexual maturity begins.

Or at least it's supposed to.

There's something inherently rotten in society now where young boys are treating girls this way. When I was a pre-teen or teenager (or in the years after, for that matter) I never leveled verbal abuse at a girl in any of the "fat, ugly or slutty" categories. This isn't "normal behavior" for young males. This is conditioning by society, and apparently being respectful toward women is now something that must be outright taught to these young men.

Many parents will have talks with their sons about girls. Be it the awkward sex talk which has little to do with interpersonal relationships, or giving a shy kid ideas on how to talk to girls. But now it seems that kids need outright lessons in how to respect women. Parents, if they witness this behavior or even hear about it in regards to their children, need to sit them down and explain that isn't how you treat people, women especially. Some of these offenders may have serious, deep-rooted issues with women in their lives, but most of the younger crowd are just trying to be funny, and that's something that can be pushed back against. I would even suggest a system that emails the parents of underage players transcripts or recordings of vile language used in game. They need a way to know this is happening in the first place.

It would be remiss to assume that all these insult-spewers are in fact, twelve year old boys. The fact is, this just isn't true. There are many, many adult men taking part in this kind of behavior. Though that information can't necessarily be gleaned from Xbox Live messages, it can be from places outside of video games. I've seen countless blogs similar to Fat, Ugly or Slutty detailing the kinds of perverted messages females receive on a daily basis on dating sites like OKCupid or PlentyofFish. These aren't kids, and the older the messager, the more graphic the message most times.